Thursday, December 20, 2012

And now it's time to play "Fear and Paranoia"! Let's remind our contestants how to play: just blame some random person or group you don't like for all the problems in our world! For example, you might use the following structure: I blame (group or person you hate here) because they (action you don't like) so we should (your political goal here)! The political action part is really just for bonus points, though - you don't even need to provide a solution, just get people scared. Today's subject is the Newtown Shootings.

Ok, who's first? Oh sheesh...it's Westboro Baptist...let me guess, you blame Homosexuals for the Newtown Shootings because they called down God's judgement? Sorry, it's been done before - you're not allowed to use the same play in multiple rounds! You are disqualified. Next - National Review? Ok, go.

Oooooh! Good one! National Review blamed women for the shooting because they're weak, and proposes that we put more macho men in schools! What an overly simplistic and naive solution, full of factual errors, and it's sexist too! 1,000 points! Who's next? Rosenberg?

Oh my, this is complete genius - Jon Stewart has made fun of the mythical war on Christmas we made up in one of our earlier rounds, so what did Rosenberg do? He blamed Stewart for the Newtown shootings because he's waging a war on Christmas! Bonus points for tying in a previous myth! 5,000 points on the board for Rosenberg! Next up? Oh, we have a teamup of the Daily Caller, Fox News, Breitbart, and Glenn Beck. This is going to be good. What's your play?

OH MY GOODNESS!!!! WE HAVE A WINNER!!!! They have ingeniously turned around a statement that pointed out the imbalance and ineffectiveness of racial profiling into racism against white people! 10,000 points!!!!!

Thank you for tuning in this week for "Fear and Paranoia", and remember - be afraid! Be very, very afraid!

Monday, December 17, 2012

I wanted to share the results of an activity I engaged in today, to make a point. But please stick with me, because it's not the point I think you're going to think I think you...er...lemme start that again - it's not the point I believe you're going to think I'm making. So please read to the end. And please don't take this too seriously - I am speaking a little tongue in cheek in my conclusion, so please don't take this personally. Also note that I do not have ANYONE specifically in mind as a target - I'm not trying to make ANYONE specific whom I know feel guilty, I'm just making a point to whomever cares. My purpose in writing this is mostly to entertain, but I hope it is educational as well.

Today, I saw this headline from July of this year in a feed I follow (Fark, in case you wanted to know):

He says that "in my lifetime alone, far more Americans have been casualties of domestic gunfire than have died in all our wars combined." I thought "no way, really? He's got to be exaggerating." Now EVERYONE knows that pundits lie (right?). So I had a choice: I could assume he's lying, or assume he's not...and if I assume, am I basing that assumption on what I, personally, WANT to be true? So I thought...well, let's see what 5 minutes and some googling can come up with for deaths in my own lifetime. (Note that the exercise took just a bit longer, but writing this post took more time.) Here's one of the first things I found:

Hmm, 30,708 killed in 1998 by firearms, but 17,605 were suicides. Well...let's be generous and subtract them out, which brings us to 60,959 total between 2006-2010, added to the number of gun related deaths in 1998 I found. I still need some more data, since that's only 6 years out of my life. Well, I found this:

Not much here I can use (though there is a lot of eye opening information in that one), but I do see some years I don't have yet: 2005 (10,100), 1999 (6,500). That brings my total up to 77,559. I have 8 years out of my lifetime now. Hmm, I still need more, so I changed my terms a bit, and then I found the motherload:

This page is like a calculator that will show you deaths and injuries related to what you want to see, though it only seems to cover certain years. So I set the answer to question number one (intent) to all, and cause or mechanism (question 2) to firearm. I set the years to 1980-1998, and left the other options as the default: census region/state was set to United States, race to "All Races", sex to "Both Sexes", hispanic Origin to "All", and output options to "Standard Output". The number of deaths it gave back to me was 620,525.
Now, I'm still missing 1980, 2000-2004, and 2011-2012 (aw dang, I just gave away how old I am). But I've been searching for a little over 5 minutes now, so let's add what I've got and see what the comparison is to wars - I have 698,084 total deaths for PART of my lifetime from the 5 minutes of searching I did. Now Mr. Moyers has been alive for a bit longer, so let's just start by looking to see how the number of U.S Military casualties from the wars in his lifetime (I'm guessing which wars were during his lifetime) compare:
(NOTE: I found this info using wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war)
WWII: 405,399
Greek Civil War: 6
Chinese Civil War: 164
Korean War: 36,516
Vietnam: 58,209
1958 Lebanon crisis: 6
Bay of Pigs Invasion: 4
Dominican Republic: 47
Iran: 8
El Salvador Civil War: 37
Beirut Deployment: 266
Persian Gulf escorts: 39
Invasion of Grenada: 19
1986 Bombinb of Libya: 2
Invasion of Panama: 40
Gulf War: 258
Operation Provide Comfort: 19
Somalia: 43
Haiti: 4
Columbia: 8
Bosnia-Herzegovina: 12
NATO bombing of Yugoslavia: 20
Afghanistan: 2,031
Iraq War: 4,487
War on Terror: 6,518

HOLY CRAP. There are DEFINITELY more domestic gun-related deaths during his lifetime (and mine) than the deaths in the wars of our lifetimes! The 698,084 I came up with isn't even the full span of his life! Now, he said that "in my lifetime alone, far more Americans have been casualties of domestic gunfire than have died in all our wars combined" - so let's pretend we can guess how many total domestic gun-related deaths there were in his lifetime, and add ALL the wars the U.S. has EVER been engaged in, which this page says is a total of 1,326,612. So if you assume (I know, I'm assuming and it makes a something out of u and me, but I'm not a professional, and I said I was going to do 5 minutes of searching, which I have surpassed now) that you can double the 698,084 deaths I came up with for the years of his lifetime (I believe this is generous, since he's more than twice my age, and I didn't even get the full statistics of all the years of my life), and you come up with 1,396,168. Which implies.. that it's quite possible (come on, I was generous in the way I did my math) that the number of gun related domestic violence deaths in his lifetime is more than the number of deaths in all the wars the U.S. has ever been a part of!

NOW, for my conclusion (which is not what you're probably expecting it's going to be): I saw a statement by a pundit (which may or may not have supported an opinion I may or may not have already had), and a little alarm went off in my head and I thought "could this be exaggeration?" So, I went to google, spent just a few minutes of my time researching, and found that it is very possible that he was telling the truth. I did a fact check! See how easy that is? I didn't spend a ridiculous amount of time on it, and when I found numbers that supported his statement, I didn't question them (well, the media is so [blank] biased, so therefore I can't trust anything THEY say), but I accepted that given the research I have done it is quite possible that he was making a truthful statement. And that's all that can be asked of me, right? I'm just a regular dude, and I put a reasonable amount of effort into finding out if a statement I suspected was true or not. Now the question is: how far are you willing to go in order to fact check suspicious statements that politicians and pundits make? If you go to one of those fact-checker websites to check a statement, and their conclusion doesn't match what you wanted, are you willing to put the work into it? Or are you just going to say "well, this site is [blank] biased, so I can throw out everything they say!"

Again, I hope you found some humor in the way I presented this exercise, and found it educational, and hopefully I got my point across that it is VERY easy to fact check in this day and age - so please do so!

Thursday, December 13, 2012

A while back I wrote a letter to you, with the hope that one
day you would read it when you are older.I have been thinking lately that this is something I should do more of,
and perhaps one day it will be good for me, as well, to look back and see how
things have changed.A lot has been on
my mind lately as life changes – the most obvious of changes in our family’s
life being related to the birth of Evelyn.And this brings up the first lesson I hope to impart to you in this
letter, and I hope that I can word this eloquently and clearly as it will be
tricky:

As you face
difficulties, remember the blessings of the past, and look forward to the
blessings to come

Your mother’s pregnancy with Evelyn was…difficult.She was sick and uncomfortable; I was frustrated
from seeing her that way, frustrated with having to take up additional
responsibilities, frustrated by the worries of how life would change and how
difficult that would be.But all that
melted away the moment I met Evelyn – the love that filled my heart trumped all
worries and all the frustration of the last 9 months were all but
forgotten.I wish I could’ve kept a
sound mind during the pregnancy and realized this is how things would be,
remembering that this is how it was with Logan and Lilly, but my mind invented
new worries, such as “how are we going to manage when we (your parents) are now
outnumbered?”Your mother was much
better at dealing with this and repeatedly stated how much she was looking
forward to meeting Evelyn, and you could hear the expectation and eagerness in
her voice as she said it.Well, I hope
you will take more of her optimistic view than my often pessimistic
viewpoint.But I came around.

Now, to move on to the other lessons I am pondering and
hoping to impart to you, I need to give you a little background.We have just finished a presidential
election, one in which President Barack Obama was re-elected.I have to admit that I really don’t remember
many details of the elections that happened when I was growing up beyond who
the candidates were and bits and pieces of what I was told by the people around
me.And this is only the fourth
presidential election for which I was old enough to vote, and thus had a
personal interest in.But it seems to me
that the politics of this election were especially negative – more so than
other elections I remember – and it seems that many people I knew have been
very afraid of what the outcome of this election would be.Not only that, but I saw a lot of despair
after the results of this election, and it was disheartening to see how afraid
people were.There is a quote from a man
named Henry Louis Mencken I like, which applies to this election:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace
alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an
endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Mr. Mencken lived from 1880 to 1956, so it is quite apparent
that fear in politics is nothing new.But it is surprising, to some extent, that in this day and age where the
common man can easily direct their computer to certain websites, type in a word
or phrase to search for, and find a wealth of information, that people would be
so filled with fear over so many things which are so easily disproven.How is this possible?There is a psychological phenomenon called
confirmation bias, according to which people will sympathetically interpret
evidence that supports their beliefs and be highly critical of evidence that
does not.In one study, participants
were shown fictional studies about the deterrent effect of the death
penalty.Those who supported the death
penalty were quick to be skeptical of the studies that challenged the deterrent
effect, while being quick to accept the studies that supported it.Likewise, those who opposed the death penalty
were quick to judge the studies that supported the deterrent effect.What does this mean for us?How can we be sure of anything, knowing our
tendency to hold fast to bias?Fortunately for us, as Christians, we have a guide to help us sort
things out – the Bible.So how does the
Bible say we should conduct ourselves in this world?Well, this brings us to the next lesson I’d
like to impart:

Be suspicious of
anything that comes from fear

Now, how can I be sure that we ought to be suspicious of anything that comes from fear?Aren’t there times for which fear is a proper
response?Well, to be sure there are
often valid reasons to be afraid.But
the Bible tells us in 2 Tim. 1:7 that “God has not given us a spirit of fear
and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.”Notice here that the Bible contrasts the
characteristics we should not possess with the characteristics we should, and
pay especially close attention to the fact that it mentions love as one of these
characteristics – the Bible is so full of references to love being the chief
characteristic of God and, consequently, being the chief characteristic that
those who follow him should strive for.And
in 1 John 4, we are given detailed instructions on loving one another, an
explanation of how God mapped out for us what love is, and then we are told in
verse 18 that “love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear.”The implications of this are that, even if
our reasons for fearing are valid and reasonable (let’s be clear: most often
they are not), we still should not fear!God knows we are not perfect, and may fall to fear, and this is why he
has very liberally sprinkled throughout the Bible verses like Isaiah 41:10,
which says “Don’t be afraid, for I am with you.Don’t be discouraged, for I am your God.I will strengthen you and help you.I will hold you up with my victorious right hand.”Now, as I mentioned before, politicians and
pundits will try to convince us of a myriad of fearful, apocalyptic scenarios
that will inevitably be brought about by the evil agendas of their
opponents.But I would encourage you to
be immediately skeptical of any such logic that is based on fear.As Yoda said, “fear leads to anger.Anger leads to hate.” There is a lot of truth in that statement, and
as I pointed out before, the Bible shows us that our primary goal is to
characterize love, and there is no fear in love.History is full of examples where fearful
stories have been told to cloud people’s judgment: outrageous stories have been
told of various mysterious groups and their immense power in order to convince
people that laws meant to prevent discrimination and hate crimes were actually
part of an evil agenda to wipe Christianity out.Why is this?The answer is somewhat simple: it is too obvious of a lie to hate our
fellow man outwardly – in order to convince us to hate our fellow man, we must
first be convinced to fear him.And then
we convince ourselves that he hates us, which, therefore, justifies our own
hatred.Are there forces out there that
are trying to harm Christians?Absolutely!But we know that
often, these forces do not resort to the most obvious means, but - rather than
attacking Christians directly - will instead try to convince Christians
themselves of lies in order to lead us away from God, and anything not rooted
in love ought to be immediately suspect.I believe that our goal in life ought to be to love fearlessly and
freely, to extend that love to all we come near, regardless of race,
orientation, or class; without preconditions, accepting the individuals we come
into contact with, with all their faults included.

Now, inevitably, you will yourself fall prey to a lie –
don’t fool yourself into believing that you know all truth.So this brings us to my next lesson:

Don’t be afraid of
disagreements, but face them fearlessly with love in your heart

Too often, I think, we have a tendency to avoid anyone who
disagrees with us – we run away before ever engaging our imagined adversaries.But this attitude does not lend itself to
making progress, but instead affords us the luxury of never having to face the
possibility that we might be wrong.And
this is a prideful attitude, and one which will cause us to be held captive to
the lies we believe at the worst, or at best - if we are the ones in the right
- it means that we are selfishly allowing those around us to be held captive by
the lies they believe.So I believe we
should not be afraid to confront each other and have difficult discussions.However, we need to be very careful in how we
go about conducting these confrontations.As I said, we need to face our disagreements with love in our
hearts.One of the ways to do this is:

Do not define your
opponent, but give them a chance to define themselves – or the Rocky and
Bullwinkle title would be: don’t name call

If we come with love in our hearts to face those we disagree
with, the first thing we will strive to do is to understand their side of the
story – where they are coming from.What
this means is that we cannot fall into the trap of name calling.There has been so much of this in the last
two presidential elections – calling people socialists, and traitors who want
to destroy our country, idiots, and secret conspirators with evil groups who
have terrible agendas. But this is not productive!

I’ll never forget a conversation I had with someone who I
had overheard bashing President Obama with much zeal before the election.I asked him if Romney was such a great
alternative, and his answer was “no, but Romney doesn’t want to kill
babies.”Now, I must stop here and point
out that at this point in my life, I consider myself “Pro-Life”.However, I must also ponder this: abortion
has been legal in our nation for quite a while, as Roe V. Wade happened in
1973, and there have been Pro-Life presidents in office since then.So why is it that we’ve been losing this
battle for so long?I would propose that
one of the reasons we have been is because of the offensive way we’ve fought the
battle.We’ve turned anyone who is
Pro-Choice into a monster, and when you do that - rather than striving to
understand why those you disagree with feel the way they do, and being
diplomatic about finding a solution to the problem – you turn those you disagree
with into your enemies and a war ensues, rather than a productive discussion.

In order to solve the problems we face, we cannot resort to the
rhetoric of persecution, but instead we need to realize that often those we
disagree with have the same goals, but have different methods for achieving
them.And when we realize this, maybe we
will be able to solve some of the problems we face together.But along with name calling, there is one
other tactic we must be very wary of, and steer far clear of:

Do not become trapped
in “The Blame Game”

There is a disturbing trend that has been very visible in
the political environment of today where the persecuted have been painted as
the persecutors.Perhaps the best
example of this comes in the form of the Matthew Shepard Act.On October 7, 1998, Shepard was robbed,
pistol whipped, and tortured, tied to a fence post and left for dead.He was not dead, however, but was in a coma,
which was a result of the injuries he had sustained in the attack.He was left tied to the fence post for 18
hours before he was discovered by a biker who initially mistook him for a
scarecrow, most likely due to the fact that he had been so brutally beaten that
he was no longer recognizable as human from a distance.This was largely publicized because of
Shepard’s sexual orientation – he was homosexual – and because the defense
employed what has become known as a gay panic defense: they proposed that the
murderers had been in a state of panic because Shepard had propositioned them,
and thus were in a state of temporary insanity.The previously mentioned act sought to expand the hate-crimes prevention
act to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender,
sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.Now, it is hard for me to imagine a world in
which this would be a bad thing – clearly what was done to Shepard was awful,
and we should be moved to want to prevent such things from happening.The purpose of the bill was to allow the
government to track such crimes, and fund investigations of them, but somehow
it was twisted in the minds of many as being part of a “Gay Agenda” to "muzzle
people of faith who dare to express their moral and biblical concerns about
homosexuality."How does such a
bill become twisted in this way?I
think, to find the answer, we can go back to the fall of man in the Garden of
Eden: the first sign of the fall was that Adam and Eve engaged in “The Blame
Game.”Rather than accepting their own
blame, Adam and Eve looked for scapegoats to justify their sin.So how is it that I believe this applies to
the Matthew Shepard Act?There is a
Freudian theory of Psychology by which people, rather than face the
uncomfortable fact that they harbor undesirable and ugly feelings, will
displace their feelings and project them upon those towards whom they harbor these
feelings.Thus, when faced with the fact
that they harbor discriminatory feelings towards homosexuals, rather than
facing this uncomfortable fact, opponents of the bill would spin an elaborate
conspiracy theory of a “Gay Agenda” to take over America and outlaw
Christianity – this removed any guilt they had, because they felt that they
were then justified in hating Homosexuals: after all, the Homosexuals hated
them first, according to the subconscious dialogue.But this is not the only example of such
psychology at work – the persecuted becomes the persecutor in many dialogues
involving race, class, nationality, and political stance.There are many stories of secret agendas and
plots to discriminate, and often when you look at the evidence and know your
history you will find that the ones supposedly involved in such plots are
actually the ones who have been persecuted.Therein lies the awful power of playing “The Blame Game” – we use it to
justify our own sinful feelings, and the horrifying result of this is that
often when we play this game our feelings are then translated into
actions.We justify those feelings we
are uncomfortable with using “The Blame Game” and then act on them out of the
fear we have manufactured for ourselves.We turn ourselves into the holy soldiers fighting a righteous war
against those who would discriminate against ourselves and those like us.But this is not what Jesus taught!Jesus exemplified and extorted us to live a
life based on love that reaches out towards the least, the lost, and the lonely
in a way that placed no preconditions on such love and showed no limits to how
far he would go to display it.Fighting
secret agendas was not how Jesus showed us to live our lives – he taught us to
love unconditionally!

There is a movie, based on a book, called “I Am
Legend”.It is a terrible movie, in my
opinion, because it changed the original ending of the book and lost the entire
point.The story is about a post zombie
apocalyptic world, and follows the main character as he lives his life, hunting
down and killing zombies along the way.At the end of the book, he comes to a realization that is horrifying to
him as he witnesses one of the zombies caring for a young zombie, and realizes
that these are not mindless creatures without emotions – they have thought
processes and emotions, and what’s more: none of them have ever harmed him.He realizes that the whole time he was
hunting them, they were afraid of him and that is the meaning of the title “I Am
Legend” – he realizes that he is their legend, their Dracula, their mythical
monster that has been hunting down the innocent and helpless of their
society.The danger in painting those we
disagree with as being fearful beings who are trying to destroy our way of life
is that we may inevitably become Legend, and we need to avoid such language in
our discourse.I believe that Jesus
modeled being a peacemaker in the way he reasoned – he made his points
carefully and thoughtfully, and did not paint those who disagreed with him as
being monsters who were trying to destroy his way of life.We need to reason as Jesus did: out of a
spirit of love, we need to be peacemakers; reasoning with people diplomatically
and calmly.The purpose of the Christian
life is not to fight Holy Wars against those who oppress us, but if we do have oppressors (and we do, but
often they are not the people we think are our oppressors – too often they come
in the form of those who pretend to be “on our side”), we need to face them with
love.Because that is the goal of
the Christian life: to love God, and love people.

There is one final lesson I’d like to impart:

Hold your treasures
with an open hand

In Matthew 19:16-29, there is a story of a rich man who asks
Jesus what deed he should do in order to have eternal life.Jesus lays out some of the basic
commandments, and when the rich man responds that he has followed these
perfectly, Jesus finally tells him that he must sell everything he has and give
the money to the poor.Now the moral of
the story is not that we can get into heaven by doing this – on the contrary,
if you keep reading, Jesus says, when his disciples ask who can be saved:
“Humanly speaking, it is impossible. But with God everything is possible.”But there is another moral to this story, and
I believe that it is this: what you hold onto with a tight fist is what makes
you a prisoner.The rich man in the
story believes that he can gain access to heaven through his deeds.And I think that the way Jesus responds to him
points out two mistakes this man is making:

1)The rich man in the story believes that he has
followed the commandments perfectly.Jesus tells the man that he must not murder, commit adultery, steal,
lie, he must honor his father and mother (or, those who are in authority to
him), and love his neighbor as himself.The rich man’s reply?“Oh yeah,
I’ve done all that.”But if you know
anything about the teachings of Jesus, you should know how silly this response
is – Jesus repeatedly points out that it is not the letter of the law that
matters, but the spirit.He extends the
law against murder by pointing out that if you call someone an insulting name
in anger you have murdered them in spirit.If you lust after a woman who is not your wife, you have committed
adultery, and so on.This should make it
painfully obvious to us that we can never
obey the law perfectly as long as we inhabit this earth – our only hope is in
the redemption provided by the only one who ever has.

2)When Jesus tells the man to sell all his
possessions and give the money to the poor, I think that this statement does
more than point out the dangers of treasuring money.Jesus is pointing out that there is a
commandment the man has not obeyed – the commandment to have no other gods
before God, and to make no idols.I
think that in the context of the whole story, this could be extended to the
preceding section of the conversation to imply that if you treasure legalism,
you have made the same mistake of creating an idol out of it.

The point I’m trying to make is that our legal system is not
perfect – it never will be, because our world is imperfect!No matter what laws we impose, there will be
suffering and pain and hatred and warfare.Should this stop us from trying to improve our legal system?By all means: no!But if we fight these battles in such a way
that we are making an idol out of legality, we have already lost!That which you treasure most is what makes
you a prisoner.But if you open your
hand, and let God decide what happens with those things, you will be free,
because He is the only ruler who rules justly – He is the only “Good Shepherd”.And I would ask those who fight these battles
to “protect our rights as Christians” a serious question: are these battles
making us free, or are they rather making us prisoners to fear and hatred in the
way that we are fighting them?

In conclusion, my dear children, I will admit that I am a
horrible example of how to live by the lessons I have just outlined.I know this full well, but I hope that by
remembering these lessons and seeking to live by them, I will come closer to
becoming the child of God that I ought to be.And I hope that you will do better than I have – I hope you will be able
to avoid the traps we so often fall into, and will live in love, the way Jesus
taught us to do.But no matter what
happens, know that our God is a God of redemption – he can redeem the worst of
the worst, and nothing we do can separate us from His love.Likewise, know that I will always love you.

On 4/15/2011, I wrote an open letter to my children. Now I post it here.

My dear children,

Today as I sat down at my desk and prepared to begin my
day, I looked up at the walls of my cubicle and saw the pictures of you that
were taken on the day you were born: Logan looking up at me with wide eyes, and
Lilly sleeping peacefully in your mother’s arms, wrapped up safe and
sound.I began to think of how right now
you cannot understand just how I love you and I thought of how one day when you
are grown circumstances in your life may have brought you to a place where you
can maybe understand better.I thought
of how my own journey in life brought me to this place.I thought of how there were times when I did
not understand my own parents and felt oppressed by them, how there were dark
times in my life when I felt that no one truly loved me, and I wondered if you
would go through times like these.I
thought about what an imperfect example of love I am.And I thought of how, despite being
imperfect, you truly are the greatest joys in my life, your births are the most
important events of my life, and bringing you into the world is my greatest
accomplishment.I remembered the day I
became a father, how I realized with fear and trembling that somehow, having
only known you for scant moments, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that protecting
you was the most important thing in the world.I learned an important lesson about love when I realized that on the one
hand, if anything were to happen to hurt you it would hurt me far greater than
anything that could happen directly to me – and that was a very frightening
realization.On the other hand, I also
realized something wonderful that I hope I never forget: that if anything were
to physically happen to me, such as losing an arm, as long as you were safe it
would be insignificant: nothing can truly hurt me as long as I have love in my
life.I know there will be times in your
lives when you feel completely alone, unloved, misunderstood.I know there will be times when I act very
human and set a poor example of what love truly is.I know you will experience hard times, and it
hurts me very much to know that.But I
hope and pray that one day, you will emerge from the fog, and you will look
back and see that all throughout these hard times you were very much loved, and
loved deeply.Maybe you will see the
evidence that during these hard times, someone was weeping for you – wishing
you could see clearly what lay ahead, and understand how insignificant the
pains of this world are.I pray that one
day you will love and be loved deeply, and that through this you will
understand how much you are loved by your father on earth, and your Father in
heaven.And I hope you will understand
that love means that all those times you looked at your Father and denied his
love – they have been washed away and forgotten, never to be brought up
again.Don’t ever let shame cause you to
hold back and avoid your Father’s arms – there is nothing you could possibly do
that would ever cause him to stop loving you.Just like the father in the story of the Prodigal son – he will stand at
the edge of his driveway watching and waiting for your return no matter how
long he has to wait and the moment he sees you he will run to embrace you,
never waiting for or requiring your apology before he wraps his arms around
you.I pray one day you will know this
love, and learn how to give love of the same kind to those around you.I pray you will understand that love is the
greatest accomplishment and the most important task in this life on earth.

If I could speak all the languages of earth and of
angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging
cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret
plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains,
but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. If I gave everything I have to the
poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love
others, I would have gained nothing.Love
is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does
not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being
wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth
wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and
endures through every circumstance.

In this life I know I will never be a great example of
Love.But I love you, just the same.

About Me

I am married to a gorgeous woman
who makes life beautiful. I have three children who are the loves of my
life. I am learning more about love every day. My family and I moved
to Chattanooga in December 2010 and are loving it! We've been attending
The Vineyard and are feeling like we are more a part of that church
than we have of any church in a long time. I am a music snob which
means that I hate any radio station that plays just hits resulting in
the same dozen or so songs repeated every hour. I reject the politics of persecution and oppose absolutist, demonizing rhetoric. I am a geek/nerd.

1 Corinthians 13:1-3 NLT

If
I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love
others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had
the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and
possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move
mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. If I gave
everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast
about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.